Public Journalism and Citizen Involvement

This week’s readings covered the topic of public journalism and discussed whether the movement was worthwhile or went against what journalism is all about. According to Voakes, public journalism has five main criteria; to listen to the stories of citizens, to examine alternative ways to frame stories on community issues, to promote discussion on these issues through their stories, to report on major public problems and find possible solutions, and to pay attention to how well and credibly the journalist is communicating with the public. Essentially, this means that the job of a public journalists is to report on topics that affect the public sphere and promote discussion and involvement for the average person. Public journalism began as a product of the news industry who experimented with ways of reporting the news. It drew upon the ideas set by Walter Lippmann, who felt that society would only function if it was well-informed and well-educated, and this included journalists. However, the concept of public journalism has been under fire by many scholars. Some view the movement as causing journalism to lose its objectivity because of the fact that it frames its stories in a particular light to get people to pay attention to issues. It is also controversial because though it caters to what is deemed important to the public, it ignores the fact that these issues may not be important to everyone, thus ignoring parts of the population.

Nichols conducted a study to find out the effects of public journalism on society. She and her team researched many different cases of public journalism in an attempt to measure whether or not public journalism has achieved its goals of improving the public’s involvement in political issues and increased citizenship and volunteerism. Nichols’ study found mixed results. In some cases, there was an improved sense of citizen involvement, but in others it was found that just because the public was given more information does not mean that there was any kind of improvement. The type of issue being framed has a large effect on whether or not cozens were more involved, as focuses on education and crime yielded different results. But despite this, the overall results suggested that public journalism was helping to increase public participation in general.

Friedland discussed the kind of effect public journalism had on communities. He writes that public journalism is at a crossroads. Though the media wants to embrace it, there is still some uncertainty about how well the movement will last in the future. Friedland researched three different communities, each with a different level of public journalism. and the effect public journalism had on the community. Friedland also commented on whether public journalism would be able to sustain itself in the future, as many believe that it will eventually die out. Friedland attributes this partly to the fact that the media is essentially privately owned by corporations. This makes it difficult to do true public journalism, as there is always the chance of private intervention by these corporations. Friedland is also discouraged by the fact that there appears to be less and less public dialogue as time goes on and there are very few universities that teach the craft of public journalism. What I thought was very interesting was one of Friedman’s final remarks; that perhaps public journalism would be turned over the actual citizens and that they would start a movement of more citizen involvement in the public and political spheres. If citizens learned how to frame issues in a way that sparked political debate, this would only help the cause and make civic life even healthier.

The rising popularity of internet blogs seems to go along with this ideas of public journalism, or at least the last concept covered by Friedman, which was the increased involvement of the public in civic life. Blogs have made it easier for the average citizen to express their views and open the floor for debate. No longer does one have to be a professional journalist to cover the issues that are deemed important. By using blogs, it is the public communicating with the public and opens up a new network for communication. If blogs become even more predominant, it would further eliminate the need for journalists to chose between covering a story objectively and helping the public by writing civic journalism.